Poor old Philip Larkin, late to the sexual revolution party. He was in his early 40s in 1963, and he always sounds rather bitter about the young people of the day enjoying a freedom that he didn’t have, and “going down the long slide to happiness, endlessly” as he put it inHigh Windows.

Actually, having read Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, the excellent biography by Andrew Motion, it would appear that Larkin had a rather more active private life than his poems and glum public persona would suggest.